Q: What is your greatest video game achievement ever? Is it the famed 52 at River Highlands? Or have you accomplished an even greater feat? — Jason Giza, Chicopee, Mass.

SG: That 52 is old news. On "Tiger Woods 2002," I shot a 49 on Pebble Beach, playing on the treadmill, no less. A 49! I haven't played the game since. How do you top a 49?

Now I'm eagerly awaiting the release of "Madden 2003." I haven't been this excited for a video game in years. The defending champion Patriots getting some love in the introduction. Tom Brady's first appearance with a rating in the high-80s. The video opening of CMGI Field. Troy Brown and Adam Vinatieri finally getting their proper Video Game Due. The chance to re-enact Super Bowl XXXI over and over again, although it won't be as fun without seeing sullen Rams fans stumbling out the Superdome after the game like they had been quickly replaced by the pods from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Hopefully, they'll even include a feature where Mike Martz makes excuses right after he gets badly outcoached in the biggest game of his career; his video alter-ego could say things like, "We didn't play our game," and "They caught all the breaks," and even "I still feel we're the better team." Then we could electroshock him with the L2 button.

McLuhan (1964) saw all of man's technologies as media, as forms of communication. He postulated that the introduction of any new technology caused a shift in the sense ratio of a culture, with the effect of altering the very form of that culture, from the way individuals communicated with one another to the very institutions upon which the society existed. He sensed that automobiles, which he referred to as the "mechanical bride," sped up the movement of information (particularly in American society), giving rise to an explosive energy of fragmentation. He notes in Understanding Media:

"The simple and obvious fact about the car is that, more than any horse, it is an extension of man that turns the rider into superman" (p. 197).

This super-powerful burst of energy has had its toll on sport as well. Roads exploded the gymnasium, causing driveways in every suburb to become miniature basketball courts. At electric speed, these courts are beginning to diminish in importance, as we are drawn inexorably by TV, radio and videogame back to Madison Square Garden or Staples Center.

McLuhan points out that obsolete technologies often end up surviving by assuming a different form:

"The horse has lost its role in transportation but has made a strong comeback in entertainment. So with the motorcar. Its future does not belong in the area of transportation" (p. 195).

The same can be said for roads. As the automobile recedes into history, kids are converting city streets into asphault playgrounds, imbuing their sport with a collective style and emotion that is far different from the individualist nature of literate sport.

References

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. New York: New American Library.

Americans, more than any other culture, are stats-hungry when it comes to sport, which is one of the reasons that football (soccer) has never firmly taken hold in its national sporting consciousness. The "Big Four" major professional sports — baseball, basketball, football (gridiron), and hockey — all have the common denominator of producing reams of information, despite few other similarities between them. This abundance of information, coupled with American dominance in the media and entertainment industries, places into serious jeopardy the future of these sports.

We turn to Marshall McLuhan (1964) in Understanding Media:

"By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls — all such extensions of our bodies, including cities — will be translated into information systems" (p. 64).

McLuhan also referred to "extensions" as "amputations" of a particular function; for example, the automobile serving to "amputate" the function of man's legs. In the context of sport, this amputative effect is readily apparent when considering sport videogames. The game console amputates the user's entire musculoskeletal system, allowing him to crack a 475-foot home run, rush for an 80-yard touchdown, or dunk on the opposing centre, within the information system's environment.

Given the symbiotic relationship between sport and media, it is imperative that we explore the effects electric technology will have on sport sooner rather than later. In the same passage, McLuhan continues to say:

"Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served … all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive" (p. 64).

References

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media. New York: New American Library.

It doesn't take much to see the analogy between sports and art on the level of their respective social orchestrations.

Aleksandra Mir

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

You are currently browsing the sportsBabel weblog archives
for July, 2002.
sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.